‘‘The Great Globe Itself [...] Shall Dissolve’’

2025 (Year 3 - P2/3)

This project proposes a shifting community theatre on a contested plot in the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath. The site—once a fairground, later squatted—serves as a ground for exploring architecture not as a fixed object, but as a process shaped by time, use, and contingency. Through iterative plan drawings, CNC-milled site models, and historical mapping, a series of overlapping spatial scenarios are developed.

These speculative theatres—each tailored to a different play, season, or audience—are used to identify the most consistent spatial needs, which are then embedded into the site as concrete foundations. Around these, temporary timber structures are assembled, dismantled, and reused as required, echoing the inherently temporary nature of theatres and stage sets.

As early Greek theatre developed, a need for changing rooms (a ‘skene’) and scenery, led to a theatre combined of both stone and timber. One example is the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens which has extant gaps in the stone structure formerly used as post-holes, to construct the skene and scenery. The archaeologists analysing the ruins cannot know for certain what the timber skene constructed above the stone structure looked like. All that remains of the theatre is the stone wall and the sockets that previously held timber beams. This structural logic informs the construction of my building. Where the archaeologists reinterpret the remains of a previous buildings arrangement and imagine the structures that could be placed upon it, I (as the architect) reinterpret the foundations of past arrangements to form a new building amidst the ‘ruins’.

The theatre is open-air and can be closed/ opened up to protect crew and the audience from the elements. The latent foundations (ruins) inform new arrangements of spaces and new ways in which the ‘front of house’ and ‘backstage’ can be blurred. Whilst the design of the foundations caters to adaptations of the building in longer time scales, my designed building caters to adaptations of the building from day to day, hour to hour or act to act. Elements unfold, are made transparent, unroll, extend, on top of and around the existing concrete ruins they inhabit.

To build up alternate ruins to archaeologically reinterpret, different iterations of the ground floors are designed. Imagined hypothetical theatres are designed on the site for specific plays, in specific seasons, with specific cast and audience sizes. Each version considers the paths of the actors, crew (stage and front of house) and audience, and how they could intersect. These alternate versions were overlaid to form the geometry that was CNC- milled to form a model of the site’s ‘ruins’. These ruins form the base aroundwhich my version of the theatre is constructed.

In practice, concrete components are widely considered to have a long lifetime and a very large embodied carbon. Components with the largest embodied carbon should see the most preparation for alternate uses and ‘end-of-life’ possibilities. In this building the end of one theatre’s ‘life’ is the beginning of a new arrangement - a new set for a new performance. The re-purposing of latent structures that have been prepared well for alternate use has a huge ecological benefit to the construction process, and is especially relevant in the face of the current climate crisis.

The building and design process aims to collapse the immediate perception of time and extend it into one that is aware of deeper, more contingent time-scales.

REFERENCE: Layered discovered ruins of previous theatres and arrangements at The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens

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